Bill focuses on modeling terrestrial ecosystems and their interactions with climate and climate change. He has a varied educational background, including degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering, physics, and civil and environmental engineering. His published work includes development, testing, and application of numerical models that represent soil microbial dynamics, effects of abiotic processes such as mineral surface interactions, nutrient competition between microbes and plants, watershed-scale hydrological and biogeochemical processes, and climate-scale carbon and nutrient cycle processes.
Bill’s research interests include interactions between the soil, biosphere, and atmosphere that impact carbon and nutrient cycling, hydrological flows, leaching, and trace-gas fluxes important in climate change; environmental fluid mechanics and the interactions between fluid flows and biological processes that affect environmental quality; numerical modeling of coupled hydrological, biological, and atmospheric systems; use of carbon and oxygen isotopes in coupled hydrological and biological systems.